It is time to say the unsayable. With its interminable Acts and labyrinthine politics the America’s Cup has become a crashing bore. It’s that self-important dinner party guest who drones on endlessly about himself and his money, hogging the conversation while everyone else’s eye glaze over.

The America’s Cup is of transient interest as a sporting event. It always has been. Even in that heady day when Peter Blake won the Cup and it seemed like the whole world was talking about his historic victory, when we used a cover picture of him hoisting the Auld Mug triumphantly to the skies, our issue sales went down.

Is it any different now that there is so much more virtual space to fill? Actually, no. According to that handy internet lie detector , only 6,000 people in the UK visited the AC website during the Louis Vuitton Cup – that’s not 6,000 a day, or even a week; that’s 6,000 people in a month.

The appeal of the America’s Cup is not as a series of top flight yacht races (if it were, we’d be glued to the TP52s) but as a sailing-based Bonfire of the Vanities that flares briefly then gutters into darkness. It is a morality tale with lashings of comeuppance.

There is nothing likeable about it as a year-round low-level skirmish, though, and nothing particularly surprising or interesting about a runaway gravy train coming off the rails. So why don’t their people get back to our people in four years and in the meantime give it a rest?